The Case of the Disappearing RabbitBy Lily Huang | NEWSWEEK
Published Jul 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Aug 3, 2009
In the roadless, snow-muffled backcountry of northwestern Montana lies your best chance of ever seeing a wild Canada lynx. An improbable creature, it is small on the spectrum of wildcats—about three times the size of a house cat—and stands on disproportionately long legs, on which it is uncommonly fast. Its great head seems larger and wiser for its tuft of beard and the birdish plumes at the tips of its ears, but its feet spoil its air of gravitas. They are enormous. They act like snowshoes, and they are part of what makes the lynx supremely adapted to this part of the Rocky Mountains. Another inhabitant, the snowshoe hare, is adapted to life here, too. A lynx, if it could, would eat nothing but snowshoe hares its whole life, and pretty much does.
An animal so specialized that it only eats one kind of food has a tenuous place in the world. But this stretch of Montana—what the 19th-century naturalist George Grinnell named the Crown of the Continent—is unlike most places, or even most wildernesses. In an age of daily extinctions, the Crown has not lost any of the vertebrate species present when the first Europeans ventured this far west—creatures seen, heard, and feared by Lewis and Clark. If the Crown is a window into the past, it is also a particularly privileged window: no other intact ecosystem on the continent affords a view this grand. Only here do you find the full suite of North America's big predators—wolves, cougars, coyotes, and black and grizzly bears. Then there are the stranger beings: cutthroat trout, bull trout, and Arctic grayling in the glacial waters; river otter, bobcats, fishers, martens, lynxes, and wolverines. Between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the Crown is 10 million acres of the West as it once was, and as it would have been.
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God's angry wrath is upon the bunnies and lynxes.
